The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS), publishers of Analytics magazine and the leading association for professionals in advanced analytics, recently announced three finalists for the UPS George D. Smith Prize that recognizes an academic institution’s excellence in preparing students to become practitioners of analytics and operations research.

The new INFORMS Analytics Maturity Model (AMM) is proving to be a reliable self-assessment tool for analytics experts who want to determine how well their organizations gain the benefits of analytics. AMM allows you to input data about your organization – data is double encrypted to ensure security – rank your use of analytics on a 10-point scale and reuse the model to do comparisons over time.

Anyone interested in learning more about the INFORMS Certified Analytics Professional (CAP®) program and celebrating the program’s two-year anniversary is invited to a gathering on the afternoon of April 13 in Huntington Beach, Calif., in conjunction with the INFORMS Conference on Business Analytics and Operations Research.

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IDC forecasts big growth for Big Data

International Data Corporation (IDC) recently released a worldwide Big Data technology and services forecast showing the market is expected to grow from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. This represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40 percent or about seven times that of the overall information and communications technology (ICT) market.

“The Big Data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and startups vie for customers and market share,” says Dan Vesset, program vice president, Business Analytics Solutions at IDC. “For technology buyers, opportunities exist to use Big Data technology to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Use cases are already present across industries and geographic regions.

“There are also Big Data opportunities for both large IT vendors and start-ups,” Vesset continues. “Major IT vendors are offering both database solutions and configurations supporting Big Data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition. At the same time, more than half a billion dollars in venture capital has been invested in new Big Data technology.”

Additional findings from IDC's study include the following:

• While the five-year CAGR for the worldwide market is expected to be nearly 40 percent, the growth of individual segments varies from 27.3 percent for servers and 34.2 percent for software to 61.4 percent for storage.

• The growth in appliances, cloud and outsourcing deals for Big Data technology will likely mean that over time end-users will pay increasingly less attention to technology capabilities and will focus instead on the business value arguments. System performance, availability, security and manageability will all matter greatly. However, how they are achieved will be less of a point for differentiation among vendors.

• Today there is a shortage of trained Big Data technology experts, in addition to a shortage of analytics experts. This labor supply constraint will act as an inhibitor of adoption and use of Big Data technologies, and it will also encourage vendors to deliver Big Data technologies as cloud-based solutions.

The study, Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services 2012-2015 Forecast (IDC #233485) examines the Big Data technology and services market for 2010–2015. IDC defines Big Data technologies as a new generation of technologies and architectures designed to extract value economically from very large volumes of a wide variety of data by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery, and/or analysis. Further, the study segments the Big Data market into server, storage, networking, software and services segments.